DPLA welcomes four new Service Hubs to its growing national network: Tennessee, Maryland, Maine, and the Caribbean

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is pleased to announce the addition of four Service Hubs that will be joining our Hub network. The Hubs represent Tennessee, Maryland, Maine and the Caribbean. The addition of these Hubs continues our efforts to help build local community and capacity, and further efforts to build an on-ramp to DPLA participation for every cultural heritage institution in the United States and its territories.

These Hubs were selected from the first-ever application process for new DPLA Hubs, intended to give both prospective Hubs and DPLA a better sense of what is involved in bringing on a new Hub. Each Hub has a strong commitment to bring together the cultural heritage content in their state to be a part of DPLA, and to build community and data quality among the participants.

In Maryland, the Service Hub responsibilities will be shared by Digital Maryland, based at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, and the University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions (USMAI). The collections Maryland plans to make available include materials about Women’s Suffrage, the Civil War, World War I and II, agriculture, sports, transportation and historic architecture.

In Maine, the Service Hub will be run by the Maine State Library. Collections to be shared with DPLA as part of the Maine Service Hub include materials from the Maine Memory Network, a project of the Maine Historical Society, which in turn represents collections from a number of smaller institutions throughout Maine and from the full history of Maine, among other important topics. In addition, important films that are a part of the North East Historic Films collection and the Maine Music Box Sheet Music collection will be shared.

The final Service Hub, representing the Caribbean, is a partnership between the Digital Library of the Caribbean and the University of Florida. Topics and genres to be shared with DPLA from this Hub include Caribbean maps and materials about the Panama Canal, the sugar industry, and vodou.

“We are excited to welcome these four new Service Hubs to the DPLA Network,” said Emily Gore, DPLA Director for Content. “We look forward to sharing their aggregated content with the content of our other Hubs and with the public. We appreciate the commitment by these Hubs to broadly share cultural heritage content and to improve data quality.”